'Enough service providers - social workers and nurses and senior staff at nonprofits and clinics and hospitals - had done yoga in their own lives,' he was quoted as saying. 'It just hit in a big way for a lot of people at the same time.'

Jasmine Chehrazi, 29, who founded the non-profit studio Yoga District here three years ago, is one of the key people behind the 'yoga activist' outreach effort in the area.

She invited Lilly to Yoga District's bare-bones studio in Bloomingdale. Lilly spent three days last week at the studio teaching 30 yoga instructors, social workers and medical students how to teach yoga to a pregnant teen, an abused child or a recovering addict.

'Empowering people to meet their own needs is one of the biggest things we can do,' Lilly said. 'Yoga is just the context.'

That attitude can sound naive, and people trying to come to terms with pain or trauma may need more than yoga poses. But the Post noted: 'Even some sceptics of alternative therapies agree that yoga is a tool people can use to feel better.'

'Yoga is exercise, and it's pretty well established that exercise improves the mood and can reduce stress,' said Steven Novella, a Yale University neurologist who founded the New England Skeptics Society and edits Science-Based Medicine, a blog that has been critical of what it calls 'pseudoscience' done in support of alternative therapies such as acupuncture and herbal remedies.

'These are pretty basic science-based claims,' he said for benefits of yoga.

And the newcomers are not looking for scientific evidence either. Sasha Lord, a 27-year-old Girl Scouts field director, said: 'I suffer from depression, and I think yoga really helps me. It's an urban survival skill.'

Monea Hendricks, 27, an African American doctoral candidate at Howard University who started practising yoga to relieve stress during college, said: 'People think yoga is for upper class white people. It doesn't have to be an expensive, upscale, Northwest D.C. thing - it can actually meet people exactly where they are.'